The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for addressee location, or more in particular to a method and an apparatus wherein a specific person or addressee, who moves within specific premises covered by a private branch exchange (PBX), is accurately located if a call, whether extension or otherwise, arrives for his or her extension telephone.
The present invention is specifically applicable to a guest location system suitable for reaching by telephone a hotel guest who is using some hotel facilities outside of his or her room in the hotel.
In the case where a telephone call arrives at the hotel for a guest, for example, the guest could be reached if he or she stays in his or her room. If the guest is outside of his or her room, however, the attendant console or other telephone where the call arrives would be unaware that the guest is not in his or her room unless the guest has left a message at the console, and thus the contact of the guest by telephone would be delayed. In order to meet such a situation for improved guest services, conventional guest location systems operate in such a manner that when a guest is at some place outside his or her room and is desirous of being contacted by telephone at that particular place, the guest has the identification place stored in the exchange by an exclusive terminal unit so that a call addressed to his or her room, if any, may be transferred to the designated place of destination.
Various systems are known in the prior art in which apparatuses for generating locations from a specially provided input terminal are disclosed, for example "Equipment and Systems" No. 86, Sept. 5, 1986, pp. 12 to 15, published by Hitachi Ltd., and "Development of Composite Digital Telephone Exchange for Hotels", Exchange Research Paper SE86-132, The Institute of Electronics and Communication Engineers of Japan. Related patents include JP-A-No. 57-147363 disclosing a system for reading the facility where an addressee is situated from a given extension telephone, JP-A-No. 59-161992 disclosing an extension system, for indicating the profile of a calling party to the attendant console, and JP-A-No. 62-31298 relating to a configuration permitting the attendant console to refer to a database.